Nextcloud Quick Tip - Using External Storages to Connect to Any Share

now have you ever thought that it would be great to better have all of the shares on your server accessible through nexcloud and to easily be able to share files and folders from that with others you have well this video is for you right then guys so following on from the last next cloud video the last next cloud quick tip where we looked at putting or deleting data directly into next cloud not through its web ui or not through the client but directly into the share where we keep the next cloud data well in this video we're going to look at how we can actually connect any share on our android server internetxcloud so not only does this allow us to access our shares through nextcloud but it also means we can share any file or folder in our shares on the unraid server to either friends family or complete strangers even if they don't have their own next cloud account so i think this is really super useful so let's go back to the unraid web ui and go to the shares tab here now i know that a lot of new users when they first set up next cloud they automatically assume that all of these shares are going to be accessible through next cloud well unfortunately by default that's just not the case and like we saw in the last video we know that there's a share which next cloud uses this one here called nextcloud and inside of that share all of the users store their data inside of a folder based on the username so by default nextcloud can only access things in this share yes users can share files with other users but by default this is the only share that the docker container next cloud actually is allowed to access so if you want to be able to access other shares as well then we're going to need to use a next cloud plugin and also add these shares to the template as well so first let's go back across the next cloud and we'll install the next cloud app we need to be logged in as an admin user and we want to go up to the top right hand corner click on the icon here and then go down to apps and we want to make sure that the app external storages is installed and enabled so i'm going to scroll down here and here's external storage support and i'm going to click on to enable i'm going to have to put in my next cloud password and click on to confirm okay so now that's enabled if i go back up to the icon in the top i go to settings now if i scroll down here under the administration here we've now got this section here external storage so i'm going to click onto that and with this app or plug in whatever you want to call it it allows us to mount external storage devices into nexcloud and external storage allows us to connect to other storage devices it could be something like an ftp server somewhere on the internet or it can even be a local storage inside next cloud itself now i know what you're thinking you're thinking the unread chairs they're not actually mapped into the next cloud so next cloud can't see them well you're exactly right so that's why now we're going to go across back to the unraid web ui and map the shares we want next cloud to be able to see into the next cloud template so to do that obviously we're going to go to the docker tab and then stop next cloud and now i'm going to edit the template i'm going to scroll down here and at the bottom i'm going to click add another path port variable label or device and we want to add another path now name i'm just going to call it external media now obviously the name is just a label and you can call it anything you want i'm just calling it external media because i'm going to map it to my media share and now for the container path what we put here is important because this is where inside the next cloud file system this mapping is going to be so i'm going to put forward slash ext underscore media and now for the host path i'm going to map that to my media share here so what this means now is next cloud has access to this location in the path forward slash ext underscore media so i'm going to add that and i'm going to add one more the name i'm going to call this external software and the container path forward slash ext underscore software and for my host path i'm going to link it to the share called software okay so with that done i'm going to click add scroll down to the bottom and apply the changes and now start back up next cloud now i'm going to go back to the page on next cloud that i was on i shouldn't have to re-log in just refreshing the page should be okay okay so now for the external storage i'm going to give this a folder name and i'm going to call it media and next where it says add storage i'm going to click on this drop down box here and i'm going to click local and you can see here there are various other ways we can connect to external storages as well we can connect to amazon s3 an ftp or sftp server another next cloud instance and you can also see here that we can connect to an smb or sift share and if you don't know what that is well basically it's just like a windows share one on raid we can share out our stuff either using smb or nfs so you might be thinking well why did i bother to actually map to these and i just didn't use this smb connection to connect to my unread shares well a couple of reasons firstly everyone might not be using smb shares you may be using nfs shares on your server or you want to connect to a folder that isn't shared at all and besides if what you want to connect who's actually on the same server that's running next cloud then why go through an extra layer so for the shares on this server i'm going to use the local connection and then i'm going to connect to a share on another server where i'm going to use smb okay so with this external storage being set to local i don't need to use authentication so i'm going to go into the configuration here and put in the location and so for that i'm going to put the same as what i did in the template i'm going to put forward slash ext underscore media and now here we can choose which users are able to access this local storage so if i click onto here i can give access to various groups or just to individual users well i'm just going to give the access just to myself here and with that done i'm going to click this tick here to save that configuration okay so next i'm going to do the same for the other location software again it's local storage and the location is forward slash ext underscore software and again i'm going to be the only one with access so i'm going to save that now another thing we can do here if we click on these three dots here if we wanted to set the share to be read only so no one can delete anything we'd check this here i'm not going to do that myself and also here where it says check for changes this is how often next cloud will check for changes inside of that external chair by default it's set once for every direct access and the other option is never to never check for changes i really don't know why you'd want it to never check for changes seems pretty pointless to me but the options there should you want to set it so another important thing you might want to set is to enable sharing on the external storage so you can share it with other users or through a link on the web i'm going to enable this for this one and i'm going to click save and i'm going to do the same for the other external storage here i'm going to enable sharing on this one too now should you actually want to get rid of an external storage you can just click on delete here and then click yes and that will delete the external storage now will only delete the actual reference to the storage it won't delete the data on your server so you don't need to worry about that i don't want to delete it so i'm not going to do so now next i'm going to add another external storage this time i'm going to call the folder name isos and i'm going to add the storage on another server over smb so i'm going to go across to my other server here and they're going to connect to this share here called isos this share is a private share in which the username ed has read write access now we need to know the ip address of what we're connecting to and the ip address of this server is 10.10.20.199 so i'm going to go back to nextcloud and under host i'm going to put in the ip and the share its name is isos i don't need a remote subfolder i don't need to put in domain but the username and password i need to put in my user the ed user the username and password there and again i need to choose who has access to this i'm going to just have me to have access and again the three dots here this time i'm not going to enable sharing on this and i'm going to set this to read only and then click on the tick to save and now that's connected so i'm going to head across to files here okay and now we can see three folders with like a kind of arrow in a box on them which means they're external storages and we can also see the external storages by clicking on here and this shows the external storages that the user has access to so here's the smb isos one and the two local ones so here are the local ones media and software and the isos one here where it says size it's pending because at the moment it's indexing this so it knows how many files and the size of the share now if i was to click on this even though it's pending we can still actually browse through the files and here if i click onto media this is the local share on this server where next cloud is hosted and here we can see the folders tv shows and movies if i go into movies here we can see there's a whole bunch of movies now because i didn't set this to read only i could select all of these files i'm going to select all but one and i can delete them now you can see here it says error deleting file well i'm not sure why it's saying that because actually the files are deleted if i refresh the page you can see i've only got one movie left so that's one thing to be careful of if you delete anything here it will delete it directly out of the share now if i go back to the files here and i go into isos and i try and delete from here because it's read-only i don't even have the option okay so now let's look at sharing these external storages so this one here software i could share an individual file or i can share the whole folder so to share if i go to this little icon here i can either share as a link which i can give to other people on the internet or if i want to just share it with another user on my next cloud i just start typing the name and i'm going to share this external storage with peter griffin but i'm also going to create a share link as well by clicking the plus here and it says the links copied to the clipboard now if i click on these three dots here by default this shared link is set to read only and there's various other options here now we're going to look at sharing in much more detail in a future video but what i'm going to do is i'm going to password protect this share and i'm going to put my own password in and so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to test the link now i'm going to open up a new tab in a private window so i'm not logged into this next cloud and i'm going to paste in the url that's copied on the clipboard and so straight away is coming up asking for the password so i'm going to put that in and log in and so now here there's access to all of the files in that share and the recipient of the link they can download anyone they want or they can click at the top here and download all of the files okay so let's close this and now i'm going to log out of this user and i'm going to log back in as peter griffin and now if i go to peter's files here we can see he's only got access to this one external storage here now one thing to notice even though this folder is an external storage if i go to the left here and click on what external storages peter griffin has access to it says that no external storages are configured now this is correct because peter griffin only has access to this because i've shared it with him and so for this account it's not considered an external storage and we can see the sharing icon in it showing that this is a shared folder and it shows who shared it and that was shared by me so if he goes into it here he's got access to all of the files and again he has access to bed to do everything including deleting files so because i shared this with read write access it means that the user can not only delete files here i'm deleting elementary os but i can also create files and folders as well but if i go back to the main files tab here and i delete a whole shared folder now it doesn't delete all of the files inside it just deletes the shared folder from this next cloud account so if i go ahead and do that now we can see that it's no longer here and now if i log out and log back into my account we can see here that the external storage for me is still here it's not being deleted but if i look at the share icon here we can see here that peter griffin no longer has access and also if i go inside the folder here we can see the elementary os which peter griffin deleted is no longer here for me and the folder he created well that's still here as well so that's how to add some shares to nexcloud on your server or another server on the network really useful i find makes it super easy to send a file or folder to friends or family now as well don't forget that the external storage plugin it also allows you to connect to other external storages i find the ftp extremely useful in fact i'll probably do a video on that just a quick two minute video it's great for things like if your seed box supports ftp well you can connect next cloud straight to your seed box there's a million and one uses for this anyway guys i really hope you found this video useful and yeah you know i'm going to say next don't you well if you did find it useful well please take a moment to hit the like button and remember to share the video with any friends whom you might think will find it useful and wait hey to all of my awesome patreons out there guys thank you thank you so much for supporting me i really really appreciate it and if there's anyone out there who want to join that great bunch of people then you can find links how to support the channel in the description below anyway guys it's time for me to go now but whatever you're up to for the rest of the day i hope it's good and i'll catch you in the next video

Channel: Spaceinvader One

Views: 39,086

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Id: mOHOcgVMLGM

Length: 16min 4sec (964 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 17 2022